Tuesday January 13th, 2015

Posted at 7:22pm

Leamington OPP are crediting “old school style” police work for catching some young offenders in the town.

Police say that during a two month period in mid-December, the Downtown Core area of Leamington was hit with numerous graffiti tags.

Various municipal, private and School buildings were spray-painted by suspects.

The tags were all similar in nature with the same obscene logo, and negative wordings towards some authority figures. OPP said that the artwork was very poor quality and it does not appear to be gang related.

Over the course of a few weeks the Leamington CORE team — which is made up of OPP officers who work the streets “old school style” — walked and biked the downtown area and created relationships with citizen from all walks of life, according to police.

During their patrols, officer came across a couple of young males who had blue paint on them, along with blue paint cans. The previous mischief was done by spray painting with blue paint. Further investigation showed that the young males had similar artwork and wordings in their school book and personal belongs.

As a result the officers were able to locate 37 incidents of damage worth$14,000.

Two young people have been charged with 37 counts of mischief under $5,000.